I don't know, maybe all the artists, musicians, and poets will be too tired from doing whatever menial labor bullshit jobs are left post AI to create great art.
Why not direct our efforts into enabling more people to devote their lives to creating art instead of fewer? Wouldn't it be amazing if everyone was able to spend their time creating because the machines were doing the work we actually didn't want to do?
It will be a tough time for professional artists, but personally I don't believe we will "lose the human spark" in this transition.
If all AI art is soulless, new artists will rise that can put the missing part back in.
How many amazing potential creations have been lost because their creators did not have the time or money to make them? I'm looking forward to see what these people will create in the coming decade!
What you're claiming is essentially that when tools make it faster and easier to create art, art gets worse.
In the past this has certainly not been true - every new tool has led to new and wonderful forms of art. I'm not sure why it would change now.
I run an AI storytelling site with thousands of users and by most measures I wouldn't say it writes better than a practiced human, but what it does do is allow would-be consumers to become their own creators.
Some users spend $100+ dollars a month, not because it writes 10x better content than what a $10 Kindle unlimited subscription offers, but because even at 50% the quality they'd rather have the story they wanted to tell but didn't exist elsewhere.
For me AI art is not about replacing creators: it's about letting users go from passively consuming content made by people who have skills, time, and/or resources they lack to actively creating what they want to see in the world.
I'm not sure how compatible being against the democratization of creation really is with the narrative of defending the arts.
People assume my storytelling tool is for writers because until relatively recently there was no other option: you couldn't make a writing tool for readers who only want to read, or a photography tool for viewers who only want to view, or a music tool for people who only want to listen.
But we're getting closer to tooling that makes it so frictionless to create, that you can insert the creation process in the consumption process, essentially turning it into curation.
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Next week Gemini Flash comes out and we're going to have access to the first publicly available image model that can edit images with as much nuance and understanding as current SOTA LLMs do for text.
Everyone is focused on a possible plateau in intelligence, but steerability is the key for creative output, and there are so many angles to attack it from that we're at the infancy of what generative AI can do for creative output.
Thing is the story was so fucking stupid that I stopped after generating one image. They probably didn't make the story itself with AI but it sure was ridiculous, I basically quit as soon as they asked me to somehow include a bunch of jailed celebrities like diddy into the next storyboard image, getting out of it saying that it went against my legal capabilities to include real living people.
I hope you realize that some people with millions of dollars just have really head ass ideas they're going to put through your thing and things are going to get weirder sooner as a result. Like that idea would have ended at the drawing board with a bunch of people talking each other down from it not that long ago but now it's basically like that WKUK sketch about a grape out here [1]
IMO the real interesting questions your post brings up are:
- what kind of labor is the $100 your users are spending coming from
- where would these $100 have gone before your product existed
- where do these $100 go once they change hands from users to you
There are many answers, not a single answer, to these questions, but I think they're worth considering.
In a previous life I worked for a startup where, getting to know our users, I realized that if you broke it down the revenue was essentially money being funneled from hourly-wage workers to venture capitalists, which was a sobering realization.
"You're so talented" "I love your art" "I wish I could do that"
And now there is that fear that the validation will go away. And what are you left with?
You and the thing you didnt really love.
Dig deep.
And there's nothing wrong with that. That's part of what makes art art. Creators are not solipsistically creating art for its own and their own sake: they do it for sharing it with other people, and getting the others' recognition and connection.
Some of the greatest rock music, for one, was written to impress the other sex - and some of the best dance music was written to see people dance and their bodies connect to it.
Machines already took almost all musician jobs a long time ago. Ever heard of recording?
The current winner-take-all art fields are not very healthy for humans to work in anyway, as there are infinity starving artists for every success. Eliminating the few remaining successes won’t really change much from the perspective of the average artist.
Almost all human art today is already done by hobbyists.
As an illustrative comparison, if we apply the same “massive org chart” model used in film or video games to painting, each employee would apply a few brushstrokes according to requirements specified by a painting director. Is each of them an artist? Or is the painting director the artist?
Most of the big music, tv, and movies industry output is commercial crap, designed by committees and focus groups, and churned for the profits alone.
Meanwhile 95% of the music industry is either hobbyists or professionals that do it with a passion, and just barely make ends meet.
People are also doing that. Note you're not travelling thousands of miles on foot to tell me this message; nor are you and your family doing subsistence farming. And you probably have time to do art if you want, because of existing advances.